🧭 Exploring the Solo RPG Spectrum
🧭 Exploring the Solo RPG Spectrum
Plus upcoming solo RPG releases, bundles and sales, and an actual play preview of the map-making and news-chronicling RPG, Deadline
1. The Incredible Variety of Solo RPGs
If you’re new to solo RPGs or have only tried one type, you might not realize how many different kinds of experiences are out there. With thousands of single-player RPGs, there’s something for almost everyone. Let’s explore the main categories.
Journaling Games
These games focus on chronicling a character’s story, often by responding to prompts. The prompts might come from dice rolls, cards, or random tables.
Thousand Year Old Vampire – A beautifully illustrated game where you explore your vampire’s human failings, villainous acts, and failing memories over centuries.
Apothecaria – A cozy game where you play as a village witch, gathering ingredients and crafting potions to help your townsfolk.
GM Emulators
These “system-neutral” tools allow you to run multiplayer RPGs without a game master by generating events, plot twists, and NPC actions.
Mythic Game Master Emulator – A set of rules, random event tables, inspiration prompts, character tracking, and scene structures to create coherent adventures. Read The Soloist’s deep dive on Mythic here.
Solo Game Master’s Guide – Provides tenets and tips, like “10 Mindsets of Solo GMs, in addition to systems, prompts, and tables. Read The Soloist’s deep dive on the Solo GM Guide here.
Comprehensive Solo RPGs
These standalone RPG systems are designed specifically for solo play, offering full mechanics for combat, exploration, and character progression.
Ironsworn – A deep, rules-rich experience where you take on quests, fight battles, and explore the dangerous Ironlands. The PDF is free and complete.
Star Trek Adventures: Captain’s Log – A standalone 326-page solo adaptation of Star Trek Adventures RPG. Read The Soloist’s deep dive on it here.
Solo Rules Supplements
These are rule expansions designed to adapt an existing RPG system for solo play. They aren’t standalone games but are built to work within a particular RPG.
SoloDark – A 16-page solo supplement for the Shadowdark RPG. The free PDF is designed to onboard Shadowdark players who are unfamiliar with single-player roleplaying. Read The Soloist’s deep dive on SoloDark here.
The One Ring Strider Mode – Rules, tips, and random tables to facilitate solo play in the official Middle Earth RPG The One Ring.
Solo Game Modules
These are pre-written adventures designed for solo play using existing RPG systems. These typically blend RPG and choose-your-path mechanics with stories branching based on player decisions and other events.
Alone Against the Tide – The first in a series of Call of Cthulhu solo adventures where you investigate mysterious happenings in a coastal town.
Death Knight's Squire – The first in a series of D&D 5e solo adventures set in the Forgotten Realms. Sections of the map are revealed as the PC moves through the adventure, encountering monsters, items, and events.
World-building Games
Games where you create a fictional world often by responding to random prompts to generate locations, cultures, and history. Some have you create maps of dungeons, cities, or entire worlds. They’re fun on their own but are also used by GMs to create game settings. Read The Soloist’s world-building special issue here.
Ex Novo – A city-building game where you define the geography, culture, and struggles of an evolving settlement.
Journey - A game where you play as an explorer documenting a world of your own creation.
Solo Adjacent Games
There are even more solo tabletop experiences beyond these categories. Interactive gamebooks like the kid’s classic Choose Your Own Adventure series or the more mature Choose Cthulhu Books let you guide a character through a branching narrative by making key decisions, leading to multiple possible outcomes. Many solo board and card games have character-driven experiences that incorporate RPG elements. The lines between these categories often blur—solo RPGs can incorporate elements of world-building, journaling, complex RPGs, and even choose-your-path mechanics.
Over the next few months, I’ll be diving deeper into each of these categories, offering recommendations, interviews with creators, tips for solo play, and more play reports in Solo Sessions. Stay tuned!
2. Solo Games Crowdfunding Now
🗞️ Deadline
Deadline is a news-chronicling and world-building solo or co-op RPG where players become journalists for a city’s newspaper. You start a game by using a series of tables to establish facts and create a map of the city. Once established, players document city events in the form of news headlines.
“The city you will create will be one of steam-powered industry, political corruption, rebellion, and a touch of the arcane.” — Deadline rulebook
I enjoyed playing through a session with a set of preview rules provided by the creators. The game’s simple mechanics and richly themed prompts made it easy to bring to life a low-magic, industrial revolution-era city full of potential adventures. You can see my map of Lunicia and read recent headlines from The Moonlight, the city’s most respected newspaper, in my play report Solo Session: Deadline.
Deadline is crowdfunding on BackerKit until October 1.
🪄 Tangled Blessings: Echoes of Lost Electives
Tangled Blessings: Echoes of Lost Electives is a new supplement that expands Tangled Blessings, the solo or two-player journaling RPG inspired by dark academia media, ghost stories, and graduate school. Echoes adds 120+ new prompts, 16 additional endings, 2 new college houses, and more. The core book is required to play the expansion. Tangled Blessings: Echoes of Lost Electives is crowdfunding on BackerKit until September 20.
👾 Alien Sanctuary
In Alien Sanctuary, you manage a rehabilitation facility for alien life injured by human colonization. It plays like a tycoon game where you build and maintain infrastructure, attend to the needs of the aliens, and manage funding. The game is from Toby Lancaster, the creator of the popular solo dungeon-crawl RPG, 2D6 Dungeon. Alien Sanctuary is crowdfunding on Kickstarter until October 1.
🦑 Choose Cthulhu
Choose Cthulhu is a collection of solo choose-your-path adventure gamebooks that put you at the center of a story facing the cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. These well written and nicely illustrated 120-page books have branching stories with two to four choices per page. They follow the classic choose-your-path format with no dice rolls or character stat tracking. Explore books 1-6 on DriveThru RPG and check out books 7-10 on their Kickstarter page.
3. Bundles and Sales
Troika! 2024 Bundle
Bundle of Holding has brought the science-fantasy RPG Troika! together with three adventures for $9.95 until October 7. In addition to the core rulebook, you get three third-party sourcebooks:
Swann Castle by Hex Games: The forested crossroads at the Multiversal Junction of 100 different worlds.
Bridgetown by Technical Grimoire Games: Connect your campaign worlds with this endless crowded bridge, and take time to make a tasty stew.
Goblin Mail by Evlyn Moreau: A deep dive into the disorganized multiversal postal system run by goblins.
Playing Troika! solo: If you’re interested in playing Troika! without a GM, Royce Rosewood has an entertaining YouTube series showing his playthrough. He also posted a cheatsheet and tables.
TTRPGs for Accessible Gaming Charity Bundle
The TTRPGs for Accessible Gaming bundle, organized by
, will help fund the production of the first ever Braille RPG dice available at retail worldwide. This is such a smart idea to improve accessibility to our hobby.The bundle includes over 300+ tabletop RPGs, supplements, and art packs worth $981 for a donation of $10 or more to support the DOTS RPG Project. It runs on itchio until October 20.
Lost Bay Studios Spotlight sale
Print editions of some popular solo games from
and are 15% off at The Lost Bay online store.4. Last Roll 🎲
The Choose Your Own Adventure Tarot Deck is coming soon
If you are a fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure books and a journaling gamer who uses Tarot decks for prompts, your worlds are about to collide! The Choose Your Own Adventure Tarot Deck is coming September 24 and available for pre-order now through Amazon. The CYOA deck is faithful to the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. An included guidebook explains the history of Tarot and instructions on how to read the 78 cards.
New York Zombies, a Fun One-Page RPG
New York Zombies is a one-page, tri-fold solo RPG where you play a survivor escaping a Manhattan that’s been overrun by the undead. To get out alive, you must make it out of Harlem, through Central Park and Midtown, and finally survive the Lincoln Tunnel. New York Zombies is available on itchio for $2.00.
Just for Fun! on YouTube
Remember Dicebreaker, the short-lived provider of tabletop news and reviews? It was too awesome to last. Thankfully former hosts Maddie and Wheels have started their own new channel: Just for Fun!. Maddie’s first video covers the best solo RPGs of 2024 with a shout out to The Soloist!
Great article! I think there are a few more categories of solo games—or perhaps more accurately—modalities of solo play that could be explored:
A. Open Soloing / Everything is Play
A multimodal, zoom-in/zoom-out freeform style where you flow between world-building, character creation, situational design, in-character decision-making, switching perspectives, writing, and scene-playing, compiling playlists and pinterest boards etc. It’s more like a stream of consciousness immersive play, for example:
1. reading random paragraphs from cyberpunk novels
2. going for a walk while listening to retro-synthwave playlists, imagining interactions and situations from a world you're creating
3. creating a character and playing a few scenes in this world
4. pondering over what the bar your character enters looks like
5. browsing 100 Pinterest boards for inspiration
6. becoming fixated on a cool piece of graffiti from one of the images
7. spending an evening writing short haikus that would appear as graffiti in this cyberpunk city
8. spending the next morning using graphic design software to create those graffitis
9. returning to the scene and picking up a quest from a biker gang—never returning to the graffiti topic again, but being aware they exist somewhere around the city :)
B. Ritual / Pervasive Games
These are games that blend into real life, infusing daily routines with a sense of ritual and magic. Examples include This Cat is an Oracle, where a cat's daily behaviors act as the oracle, or Avery Alder's game about sparrows, where seeing one on the street invites reflection. There are also games where you go into a forest and pin tarot cards to trees, and even Wreck This Deck fits this category in some ways.
C. Lyric Games
Games that you interact with simply by reading them, experiencing them almost like thought experiments on one hand or like poetry on the other.
These types of games aren’t mutually exclusive ofcourse rather, they often blend and overlap in hybrid forms.
I appreciate you highlighting the various types of solo RPGs. Like many other readers, I'm looking forward to the deep dives for each type. While I don't play solo RPGs currently (but did read my older brother's SYOA books when he'd allow me to haha), I've always wanted to create them for others to enjoy (inspired by said CYOA books). Your posts will allow me to learn a lot. Cheers!